Escape Competition Through Authenticity

Nugget by Naval Ravikant, and Mike Cessario (founder of Liquid Death)

Jun 06, 2025

👋 Hey friend

I was watching the Business Rebels series (offered by MasterClass) where the founder and CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cessario, was teaching branding.

I really enjoyed his class.

And one of the core ideas was to build a brand that is authentic to yourself. A brand that is an extension of who you are.

This, of course, immediately reminded me of Naval Ravikant’s insight that the key to escape competition is authenticity.

Brand authentic to yourself → Differentiated value proposition → No competition → High margins → Good business (if you get product-market fit) → Financial Freedom → Going wild in Bali → Getting bored a.f. and start a new biz → I’m officially a “serial entrepreneur” → Update my X bio: “Serial Entrepreneur. Started with $350 in my parent’s basement.”

I manually transcribed these ideas from Naval and Mike, and you can read them below :)

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Naval Ravikant:
The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have.
You escape competition through authenticity — by being your own self.
If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say Productize Yourself.
That's it.
Just figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want, that you can scale up and turn into a product.
And it will eventually be effortless for you… Yes, there's always work required, but it won't even feel like work to you. It'll feel like play to you. And modern society gives us that opportunity! If you were born on a farm 2000 years ago, your choices are very limited, right? You're gonna do stuff on that farm. Now, you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city, you can switch careers, you can switch jobs, you can change the people that you're with. You can change so many things about who you are, and who you're with, and what you're doing… That there is infinite opportunity out there for you, literally infinite. And so, it's much better to treat this like a search function:
To find the people who need you the most,
To find the work that needs you the most,
To find the place you're best suited to be at.
And it's worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation.
The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you've got like, you know, five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed… You might just end up in the wrong profession, the wrong place with wrong people for 30 years of your life grinding away.
And yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now. So just change it.
👉 Source

🟠 Mike Cessario:
The lesson here is that when you are making decisions about brand, if it’s a reflection of you… it will always be authentic!
So, Liquid Death was just my way of creating a brand that was sort of built from my principles. Look at Seinfeld… Seinfeld is Jerry Seinfeld! — it’s like a caricature of who he really is, made to be funny. And that’s kind of what Liquid Death is… It’s like a caricature of my background, spun to be funny for this particular purpose — which is a beverage brand.
70% of our customers are Gen Z and Millenials, and you can’t fake authenticity with them! They have seen more ads before breakfast than we saw in our entire childhood… So, you are not trying to figure out “Is this what the kids will like?”, It’s like… NO! [But instead] “Do I think this is cool?” “Do my friends think this is funny?” If yes… There’s probably a million other people who will think the same thing.

"I often tell founders to make something they themselves want, and YC is certainly that: it was designed to be exactly what we wanted when we were starting a startup."

- Paul Graham (from his essay "What I've Learned from Users")

So remember:
Authentic brands are generally an extension of the top decision-maker.
Core principles, not market testing, should guide your brand’s identity.
Faking authenticity is extremely difficult and rarely successful.
👉 Source: MasterClass (if you join MasterClass using this link, I’ll get a small kickback at no extra cost to you 😉 )

👉 Tired of networking with people who don’t share your values and interests?

If so, you might wanna join The Little Almanack Club.

A global community of over 250 founders and independent thinkers who meet in real life to make fun plans and grow a high-quality network.

Stop wasting time and energy meeting random people and start building connections with like-minded individuals (in your city or while traveling) who actually get you and are also on a path of becoming better, richer, and wiser.

So, if this sounds interesting, just hit the button below to apply to the Club and find your tribe in your city or on your next trip!

Join the Club!

P.S. We screen and manually approve every single application. The application takes about 10 mins to fill out. Yes… It’s kind of long, but it helps us build a truly high-quality network! So that when you meet someone new, odds are ridiculously high that it will be a worthwhile meet and lead to a meaningful friendship.

✍️ New Essay

I recently co-authored (with Brian David Crane) an essay in which we explored the differences between Formal Education and Hands-on Experience. We found there were five fundamental differences — all important to be aware of, and here I share with you my favorite visual from the essay: